CorKy.NeT Feeds

I knew it was time to pull this off my reading list when I found myself actually saying, while walking and talking, “I feel like I’m in a Cat and Girl comic, and there are still too many panels until the end”.

דיסוננס קוגניטיבי מפת ישראל בגוגל מפס

But now you object that, really, this poem is just an advanced formed of verbal bullying. Well, yeah. What did you think love poetry is? Pretty to look at, lovely to hear, and absolutely ruthless in its intentions.

Michael Swanwick at Poem du Jour

Remembered how I said those awesome Watchmen posters are very delibrate recreations of the original DC house ads that ran in the comics?

Well, someone created a Watchmen Poster Comparison just for this.

[via LMG]

Hot super-Earths could host life after all (New Scientist) (it’s a July story; I found it through a blog that linked to my Watchmen smiley):

Massive, rocky worlds called ’super-Earths’ – even those orbiting searingly close to their stars – may provide the right conditions for life, recent research suggests.

Super-Earths orbiting close to their stars, for example, experience gravitational tugs that keep them ‘tidally locked’ to their hosts. That means one side of such a planet always faces its star, the way the Moon always shows the same side to Earth.

Astronomers previously assumed such planets would be two-faced worlds of fire and ice, with one half molten and the other frozen.

But new models show that if a tidally locked super-Earth has an atmosphere at least as dense as Earth’s, strong winds could transport heat from its hot side to its cold side. Similarly, if the planet has a global ocean, its currents could help spread the warmth.

This effect still wouldn’t offset the intense heat the planets would experience at close distances to Sun-like stars. But it means super-Earths could potentially host life as close as 0.05 astronomical units away from dim stars known as red dwarfs, which make up about 85% of the stars in the galaxy (for comparison, Mercury lies 0.38 AU away from the Sun).

And in some ways, super-Earths might even be more likely to support life than their Earth-sized cousins, scientists say.

Recent research suggests that super-Earths will experience more plate tectonic activity than smaller rocky worlds.

On Earth, plate tectonics – the shifting and colliding of continental plates – is necessary for life.Super-Earths should have larger molten cores and should generate more heat than Earth-sized worlds, Valencia told New Scientist. This could cause more vigorous convection in the planets’ mantles and create thinner plates that slip and slide more easily.

So, let’s recap: a terrestrial planet 15 times more massive than the Earth, orbiting a dim red star, with a large molten core and stronger tectonic activity… that sounds a lot like Krypton. No wonder they call them Super Earths. Does one of the life forms on such a world proclaim unheeded prophecies of doom, while building a space craft to rescue its son from the dying planet?

Cake Wrecks: A blog of cake decoration catastrophe, via [jwz]

Jamais Cascio on Augmented Reality: Making the Visible Invisible

The moment that we can easily display location-aware images on an augmented reality system, we’ll have people trying to block images they don’t like. Forget ads (or advertisers) — we’ll have people wanting to block even slightly suggestive images, people with beliefs they don’t like, anything that would upset the version of reality they’ve built for themselves.

The flip side of “show me everything I want to know about the world” is “don’t show me anything I don’t want to know.”

Bringing our online myopia offline. Will this make it possible for secular jews to reclaim Jerusalem as invisible (and blind!) ghosts?

Didn’t I link to or bookmark this before? HPLHS Prop Fonts. Period fonts for Call of Cthulhu props, free for downloading. You can never have enough fonts.

I got a new phone a month ago, a Nokia 6120 or something like that, with internet and shit. This involved finally crossing the line between having an electronic device and having a portable, under-powered computer. An UI that’s fancier but less ergonomic, a power-hungry screen and a laptop’s male-sterility-inducing level of heating-up (one of the first links I found about my specific model was a petition to have it recalled because of overheating issues). Also, this whole “internet” connectivity thing, while pretty impressive and fast (yo! I’m on the street, looking at my blog! Hey! I’m sitting in Dixie, browsing Google reader!), is actually a money-grubbing scheme to charge you exhorbitantly for bandwidth. The phone feels like a platform for Orange to spam me with pointless ads and downloads.

Also, there’s the issue of transfering stuff between the phone and my computer. There’s a USB cable, but the phone doesn’t simply mount as another drive, like any USB drive should. There’s actually some ornate synchronization protocol and some remarkably user-unfriendly tools for using it, which I haven’t managed to get to work. Also, many tools expect you to use a Bluetooth-enabled computer.

I found a good step-by-step tutorial on setting something up here: Nokia PC Suite for Linux with ObexTool on Ubuntu Gutsy. It’s actually not equivalent to the PC Suite thing, because it doesn’t synchronize calenders and contacts, which are hidden away on the phone in some arcane corner. But it works for transfering files (MP3s, photos). So, whatever.